Post 500.....

Three years, five hundred posts, fifty-five thousand pageviews. 

A sick kid, a kidney transplant, a dying car, new grandchildren.  Surviving being sandwiched among four generations of family.  Storms, floods, remodeling.  Laundry, housekeeping, vacations.  Special education, opera, making wishes and Paris.  Surgery, sadness, fear and despair.  Hope, happiness, silliness and games. 

Three years is a long time.  It's nearly a quarter of Babygirl's life.  It's almost half of the life she can remember.  Maybe that is why she has adjusted better to it all than I have.  I have vivid memories of 'normal' that she hasn't got, and despite three solid years of experience to the contrary, I keep mentally expecting to wake up and discover that things have gone back.  She's over that.  She might hate some parts of her life as they are, and she still fights daily to feel better, but she doesn't do it expecting or even hoping that things will magically change.  She has more peace about it than I do, or at least it seems that way. 

It is in my nature to fight to change things.  There is always at the back of my mind a plan for making things better, easier, less of a struggle, and there always has been.  From crazy schemes to make my parents like each other better to going to medical school so I could keep working on that cancer cure to caring for the poor and underserved, there has always been an interior script, a narration in my head, something that I see and want to make real.  With Babygirl I've lost the thread of that story.  Truth be told, I've lost the thread of the story for all my kids, but with the older ones it's because they've taken it into their own hands and are making their own lives, which is as it should be.  It feels right.  But it doesn't seem right with Babygirl.  It seems too soon to let her take her life into her own hands and work out her story, but being sick grows a kid up.  She may be 14, and sometimes she's REALLY 14, but the real story is that she's never going to be like any other kid at school.  She's been pushed into maturity.  She's scripting her own life and doesn't need me as co-author.

I started this blog to tell our story.  I hoped if enough people saw it we might get a kidney from a living donor.  I thought that that was the key to "happily ever after."  Now, the blog is my story.  Babygirl is not a child anymore, and she'll tell her own story in due time. 

DeeDee